Mercury
Mercury is the messenger: how information gets in, how you process it and how it comes back out as speech, writing or a text message. It describes your thinking style more than your intelligence.
- Governs
- Thinking, talking, learning
- Cycle length
- About 88 days
At its best
A comfortable Mercury gives a clear voice, a knack for explaining and an ease with new information. The sign tells you whether that voice is brisk, careful, playful or poetic.
Under strain
Under strain, Mercury is overthinking, talking past each other or sending the message that reads differently than intended. Tradition's advice is the practical one: slow down and confirm.
In your own chart
Mercury never strays more than about 28 degrees from the Sun, so it is in your Sun sign or one of the neighboring two. If yours differs, it explains why a sun sign description sometimes describes your style of feeling but not of thinking.
Related sign
What Mercury Stands For
Mercury is the messenger and covers the everyday mind: how you take in information, organize it and express it. In a chart it describes your learning style, your sense of humor and your manner in conversation. A quick, playful Mercury sounds very different from a slow, careful one, even when the speakers are equally intelligent.
Mercury Stays Close to the Sun
Because Mercury orbits inside the Earth's orbit, it never appears more than about 28 degrees from the Sun. That means it is always in your Sun sign or in one of the two neighboring signs. If it is in the sign before your Sun sign, your thinking tends to be a little more instinctive than your identity; if it is in the sign after, it runs a little ahead.
This also explains the common feeling that a Sun sign description is nearly right but describes how you feel rather than how you think.
Mercury Retrograde in Perspective
Three or four times a year Mercury seems to move backward for about three weeks. The reputation for chaos is out of proportion to the tradition, which mostly recommends reviewing and revising. See Sky Events for what the period is really about.
Mercury by Element
A fire Mercury thinks fast and speaks up readily. An earth Mercury is practical and deliberate, and prefers facts to theories. An air Mercury loves ideas and conversation and often has several things on the go. A water Mercury thinks through association and mood and remembers how things felt. None of these is more intelligent than another; they are four ways of handling information.